Modeling the Morphology of Fast Radio Bursts and Radio Pulsars with fitburst

TL;DR

The paper introduces fitburst, a flexible framework for modeling radio pulsar and FRB signals, capable of generating synthetic dynamic spectra that account for various physical effects and observational features.

Contribution

The paper presents fitburst, a novel modeling framework that accurately simulates pulsar and FRB signals, including effects like dispersion, scatter-broadening, and phase wrapping, enhancing analysis capabilities.

Findings

fitburst effectively models CHIME data of pulsars and FRBs.

The framework accounts for intra-channel smearing and phase wrapping.

Synthetic spectra generated match observed features well.

Abstract

We present a framework for modeling astrophysical pulses from radio pulsars and fast radio bursts (FRBs). This framework, called fitburst, generates synthetic representations of dynamic spectra that are functions of several physical and heuristic parameters; the heuristic parameters can nonetheless accommodate a vast range of distributions in spectral energy. fitburst is designed to optimize the modeling of features induced by effects that are intrinsic and extrinsic to the emission mechanism, including the magnitude and frequency dependence of pulse dispersion and scatter-broadening. fitburst removes intra-channel smearing through two-dimensional upsampling, and can account for phase wrapping of "folded" signals that are typically acquired during pulsar-timing observations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of fitburst in modeling data containing pulsars and FRBs observed with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) telescope.